A major strategy in the creation of sustainable economies has been the establishment of alternative market institutions. However, the dynamics of these markets are poorly understood. What are the rules of behavior by which these markets function? How do these markets maintain their separate identity as “alternative” and apart from the conventional (“free”) market system? Building on Lyson’s not...

Increasing agricultural productivity is a policy priority in many countries. O'Donnell (Am. J. Agric. Econ. 94(4): 873–890, 2012) decomposed change US agriculture using Lowe total factor (TFP) index. We replicate the original study, assess its robustness to alternative TFP indices, and extend analysis EU agriculture. consistently find that growth mainly driven by technical progress. In agricult...

Agricultural production relies heavily on manmade chemicals used as fertilizers and pesticides, and to regulate plant growth. Pesticides are released intentionally into the environment to control insects, weeds, plant diseases and other pests that affect crop or animal production, as well as to control insects that spread human diseases. Pesticides have a well-established role in agriculture an...

In this paper, we consider the effect of increasing the area of agricultural land under organic practises. We assumed that organic agriculture does not have effective means of pathogen control. We model pathogen dispersal with a diffusive logistic equation in which the growth/death rate is spatially heterogeneous. We find that if the ratio of the organic plots to conventional plots is below a c...